


Zooks- a series of short stories

by dzae



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7145126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dzae/pseuds/dzae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zooks grew up in an orphanage somewhere to the left of space and time. What does a childhood look like when raised by eldritch creatures from the Beyond? </p><p>This was the backstory I had for a character in a D&D campaign- it eventually finished, but I kept writing this all the same. The setting isn't explicitly from D&D, but it has typical fantasy elements and a few references to the terminology- hopefully it's understandable without being into D&D itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Kobold Encampment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader warning: there's (very limited) description of the aftermath of violence.

Ms Rorforl said she found Zooks in a war-torn human settlement: the rift had opened that day as a worn down, unremarkable shrine in the slums. A gnomish woman -her face shrouded in shadow- delivered him to the door, knocked once, and left silently. She didn’t look back. The guardian of the entrance had taken the form of a stone snake, draped over the doorway, and waited for her to leave before it gently picked Zooks up and took him through.

He grew up on an island. The orphanage -a sturdy building with thick walls and ornate, reticulated windows- stood at the foot of a grassy hill along its north side: to the south, the ground receded until it met the water in the form of a crescent beach. It was a few miles across, either side, and cattle grazed without impediment in the low meadows, which patterned the landscape between patches of woodland. A river ran through the island that emerged near the orphanage, pouring from some subterranean stream with no clear origin.

His formative memories were of staring into the mists that surrounded the island, reducing anything more than fifty feet from the shore to indistinct shapes that fluttered and slithered in the unclear boundaries of water and sky. Strange things crawled upon the slimy sea, and in the worst days of winter the mists pressed closer to the shores, while the children were herded swiftly inside until it passed. They resigned themselves to watching through the windows as the mists swept over the orphanage, or exploring the vast expanse of sub-levels to the house that sprawled under the island in a cobweb of tunnels, each turn bathed in an ethereal and distinct coloured glow. Ms Rorforl always stayed on the surface, staring into the mist intently.

In the autumn, the wind rushed along the island in golden waves of leaves, and the landscape had a sense of presence which dispersed the nearby mists, so that the sea was a clear, still pool of inky black water. It was customary to start the season with lanterns and decorations, harvesting pumpkins to hollow out and scatter along the river. The children carved wooden boats out of tree roots, letting them loose by its origin at the foot of the hill, and could see them drift all the way to the beach. The night sky overfilled with stars, cold and bright against the void, and the river itself was bathed in silver light.

Zooks didn’t know why some of the traditions were held; Ms Rorforl performed them with such an air of importance that he followed them without question. Later, he would piece together symbolism from the stories he heard about Veles: of the god’s yearly attempts to scale a world tree, or the terrible battles he fought with Perun in the strange aeons, as sky and sea and earth rebelled against the thunder god. The ceremony of the boats marked a significant point in the season: by day, flocks of birds began to arrive from unknown lands and stayed until the next coming of winter. By night, ghosts he rarely saw rose from crossroads and gnarled trees throughout the island, or from the paving stones which marked the track next to the river. Ms Rorforl kept much of her work as a necromancer to the inner caves of the hill, or in her dealings with the other world, but for a time there were skeletal cows among the herds, and spirits older than the guardian of the rift roamed the island.

The seasons were inconsistent: many years were spent in perpetual spring, and winter waxed and waned in length as autumn did. Summer was a rarity, and often spring and autumn intermingled, so that snowbells flowered as fallen leaves dried and yellowed beside them.

Once, when he was on the verge of young adulthood, Ms Rorforl let Zooks accompany her to the other world. He’d been asking after it for months, having reached a phase of curiosity about his origins, and eventually Ms Rorforl saw fit to show him what the world he’d left was like. She took time to prepare him first: the children were tutored in many things by Ethel, an elderly figure of indeterminate species, but she bridged the gaps in his knowledge of more recent history. They were to visit a southern kingdom, freshly recovering from conflicts between gnomes and kobolds in its forests, and so he was warned that hostilities would still be fresh in the minds of those he met. He accepted this too hastily, imagining more vivid horrors in each night that approached the day of departure, and when the time came he ascended the hill with Ms Rorforl, uncharacteristically solemn.

The rift had taken the form of an orchard, this time, and the guardian waited silently atop the fence border as they approached. The island seemed small, laid out beneath them, and water marked the edge in all directions. Zooks turned slowly in an attempt to affix it to his memory, but as he focused on the more distant surroundings the nearby land shifted subtly, and Ms Rorforl softly suggested that he enter. When they stepped through the fence-gate, the trees became denser, withered and burnt. He found himself in the remains of a kobold camp.

Those who were left were unconscious, dazed or pinned under the wreckage, and the initial reactions to seeing Zooks were of fear or anger, though their eyes were dull and tired. He’d looked to Ms Rorforl for guidance, and by unspoken agreement they began work against the shadow of death that hung over the camp. The better cases he was able to stabilise with a healing kit, but some resisted feebly and suspicion lingered after he had done. As he saw the looks on their faces, Zooks understood why Ms Rorforl had been reluctant to bring him. He resolved there that he wouldn’t let such atrocities happen if he could prevent them; that he would help victims like this regardless of their race.

The last person they arrived at was a mother, holding her child languidly and with diminishing awareness of its cries. Her breathing was ragged: she seemed near death- but Ms Rorforl reversed it with no more than a wave of a hand and mystic words, stabilising and restoring the kobold. The villagers were unnerved by the display, but as the kobold regained awareness and soothed her child, one summoned the courage to approach them and offer his begrudging thanks, nodding to Zooks only briefly. With that, they returned to the island. As she explained later, the journey hadn’t been to rescue an orphan, but to prevent them from becoming so, and this influenced most of Zook’s later interactions with the world.


	2. The Shadow in the Mist

It happened on the third day of summer. The hours leading up to the event were experienced distractedly by Zooks, and ultimately forgotten, but it began at the beach.

Gulls were circling the water’s edge, taking up the cries of those around them as they swooped towards the still waters, emerging occasionally with a gleam of silver that struggled in vain to escape their grasp. The sand and shale were arid, hot to the touch as they shifted under his footsteps, and Zooks was beginning to tire of his plan to jog along the coast: more so the chatter of his friends, which in the heat had begun a mild but unpleasant headache. He stopped and waved them on, communicating his need to go somewhere cooler for a while, and took a last glance at the misty waters before he began to head uphill. In the distance, a bird was flying towards the island, but veered left as it grew nearer and set a course further along the sea. Behind it, the mists seemed denser than usual, a dark grey which boded impending rain; in the circumstances, this had seemed to Zooks a welcome change.

He took shelter in the woods, quietly eschewing the children who had the energy still to play sport in the fields. The animals were silent. Green light filtered through skyward leaves as they swayed to an absent breeze, and was met on the forest floor by a soft blue glow of mushrooms, struggling to push their way through the rampant carpets of moss. He set himself between the low-hanging branches of a tree in deeper shade than this. In the space of a few minutes, he had migrated from drowsiness to sleep, and was at first oblivious to a sense of unease that in time reached his conscious mind. Something was wrong, his senses told him, but he hadn’t the inclination to open his eyes, and so simply listened.

Zooks jumped upright, dropping down to the forest floor. There was no birdsong. The skyward leaves moved still, but in the lower vegetation there was no rustling or motion to suggest animal life. The general clamour of children in the distant field had likewise ceased, and he wondered at first how much time had passed while he slept. The sun was in the same place in the sky, though while it was not cold there seemed not to be the same heat of the morning.

Leaving the woods, he could see the fields were now entirely deserted; even the cattle, which typically grazed peaceably in the same spots day after day, seemed to have been herded elsewhere. His first impulse was to visit the orphanage and find out what was happening, but his attention was drawn to the beach.

A shadow in the mist outlined an impossibly large creature’s maw -stretched open as if to swallow the island- which was frozen roughly sixty feet from the water’s edge. Framed against the sky, it seemed almost like a massive natural formation, but through the frozen mist curled against the roof of its mouth Zooks could see seemingly endless rows of teeth, cruelly pointed inwards to impale further those who tried to escape them. The water level near it had sunk, drawn in by a single cavernous breath, but in the timeless moment where he found himself, the wave this formed had not yet reached the water by the beach.

By some unknown compulsion and despite the dread he felt, Zooks headed towards the scene. The long grass around him still rippled, occasionally, but the wind had died down completely and the mist hung still in the air. The sand gave no warmth as he stepped further towards the water, and he felt like an observer of his actions in reaching the edge. His reflection looked back at him with an alien expression to his own. It jumped forwards, suddenly out of view. As if trapped in tandem, he was pushed into the black water.

Darkness. Movement. In an instant that felt far longer, he emerged from the surface of the reflection, coughing and struggling in an underground pool, which he shortly realised was shallow. The water seemed to fall all at once from his clothes as he left it, and he felt far warmer wherever he had arrived.

He was helped up by the outstretched hand of a man with a familiar face; kindly and warm in expression, with beetle black eyes and a tangled brown beard. He struggled to place it at first, cycling through the limited number of people he'd met. It was a sudden, numbing sensation that Zooks felt as he realized he'd seen the man in drawings before, from lessons on religion and divinity.

“Am I dead?” he asked. The man, who he knew now to be Veles, smiled and shook his head slightly.

“You are closer than many to death, at this time, but this is only the second of my islands; had your life ended you would have moved beyond it.” His voice resonated around the cavern, to which Zooks for the first time paid closer attention. It was shaped like a dome, the walls pock-marked with caves and recessions, and the floor was littered with shallow pools that dispersed silver light across the ceiling. A river cut across, dividing it into two halves, but the other side seemed featureless to Zooks. On his side, a boat was moored next to the god - he himself was next to a _god_ \- and paintings of old battles and strange lands patterned the walls.

He wondered, briefly, why it was called an island, and his confusion must have shown because Veles seemed amused as he replied to the unspoken question.

“Above this place is an island much like your own, though given over to the mists. This is the crossing place to the afterlife.”

“How did I get here, sir?” Zooks asked, anxious to seem respectful even as his curiosity burned.

The god looked past him to the patterns on the walls, which shifted in response to show the creature Zooks had seen at the beach. Fully visible, it had pincers to either side of its mouth that must have encircled the whole island, hidden under the water.

“There are older things than I that roam the space between the heavens; some are great and terrible legends, whispered of in stories of the Strange Aeons, but many more are unknown to mortals.” The paintings flickered erratically, showing tarrasques dwarfed by roiling walls of shadowy, emaciated limbs behind them, and Zooks shivered. “Much of this entity is obscure to me: I do not know why it surfaced so near to the hub of reality, and perhaps this will never be made clear, but it arrived with a hunger to devour the light it saw on your home.

“I could not fight the creature while the isle of Iriy still had mortals on it, but to bring them to Valholl would be irreversible. The exodus to here on Tainaron alone would have required near death. Instead, I brought each of you to a facsimile of the islands, by first sending all on the island to sleep.”

“Where is everyone else?” asked Zooks, struggling to understand the events.

“Each of you occupies a separate dream; I am present in each, split across the aspects of myself. While I answer your questions, I am moving the island before time resumes and the entity can devour it. To you, this will be no more than an unpleasant dream.”

“I don't often remember my dreams, though, sir. How much of this will I remember when I wake up?”

“You will remember this place when you return here: it may even be possible before then, if you ever see such a creature and survive.” Veles seemed to look past him, then, and the paintings reverted to their previous scenes. “It is done- the creature should not trouble us again in this aeon. It was good to meet you, child of dragons; I hope when next we meet you will have stories of your own to tell me.”

“Dragons?” Zooks asked, and then the world changed.

Zooks emerged to consciousness from uneasy dreams. Something was wrong, his senses told him, but he hadn’t the inclination to open his eyes, and so simply listened. There was a chatter of birds and branches rustled in nearby trees, though as he slowly rose he realised the sun had dropped considerably in the sky. As he left the forest, he found himself looking towards the beach, but saw nothing more than mist swirling over the water.


	3. The Wishing Well

It had been a particularly blustery season of spring; the wind came in sudden bursts that always seemed to catch Zooks off guard, which on this day left him struggling to keep his footing as the entire field of grass around him bowed under the weather. Ordinarily, he'd have difficulty seeing over the tall grass in this southern meadow; it towered above him like the cows in other fields, and most of the children at the orphanage. The wind made for a level playing ground, or rather, it levelled the playing grounds, briefly flattening acres of grass so that he could see the orphanage, high up in the distance.

Zooks still wasn't sure what had prompted him to make his way down here. The whole day he'd been beset with a restlessness of which he'd been unable to find a cause, and he hadn't felt like talking to people. Instead, he'd decided to go for a walk, but this wasn't a place he visited often. The beach was warmer; the woods and caves more interesting. There weren't even any cows in this field (Ms Rorforl had occasionally warned the children to be careful around the cattle, which made them at once utterly fascinating to him). Still, the road less travelled had a novelty to it, and with this he tried to appease his restlessness. He felt all the same that he could have picked somewhere with shorter grass; navigation was somewhat reliant on what he could see during bursts of wind.

With no small amount of stumbling, he passed from the edge of the meadow into a bordering woodland, where the rustling of the wind was hushed and matched in volume by the chattering of birds. There was a slightly worn track of dirt along the forest floor, which surprised Zooks a little. He'd not thought this place was particularly popular with the other children, either, but in the interest of finding out where they had once also gone he decided to follow it.

Towering oaks and smooth beech trees gave way to gnarled bushes and dense foliage as he moved further in, but the path was clear throughout. The birds, too, seemed quieter in this neck of the woods, and the whispering of the wind more pronounced, but Zooks was undeterred. With perseverance, he followed the track up to a gap in a hedge, and pushed through that to find himself in a small clearing.

The clearing seemed completely enclosed by greenery. Though the hedges didn't reach the canopies above, the trees behind them were choked by ivy, and green light filtered through from everywhere but the centre, where a small aperture in the canopy showed the blue skies beyond. Directly below it was a well. The walls were made of pebble-dashed stone, forming a cylinder almost twice Zooks' height, and along one side a wooden strut ran up and over it, hanging a bucket above the water like a gallows. Zooks couldn't scale the walls, but scrambled up the wood to get a better view, steadying himself against it at the top as he perched on the circle of stone. The water below was dark and still, and very far away: for a moment, Zooks had a terrible feeling that a gust of wind would make it through the hedges and send him tumbling into its depths. He clutched tighter to the wooden pole, but the wind didn't reach him here; all he felt of it was the soft, insistent whispering from the canopies high above.

He noticed a glint on the opposite side of the well. Someone had left a copper coin in the centre of one of the bricks; strange, since there'd be no reason he could think of for one of the other children to have coinage. It did remind him of a superstition Ethel had taught them, though. The path around the side of the well was precarious, and he made it at a crawl, erring on the outside of the well rather than risking falling in, but eventually the coin was within reaching distance- rather than risking further movement, he picked it up from there, and held it in a fist as he looked back into the waters.

A coin in the well and you'd get what you wished for, Ethel had said. She was quick to explain that wishes were a little more complicated and expensive than that: most wizards used up diamonds for them, and wells featured only in the most obscure rituals. It was a nice sounding superstition, all the same, and he tried to think of how best to make use of the opportunity.

An insistent little part of him immediately suggested his heart's desire, but Zooks felt it was prudent to know what it was he wanted before he asked for it. What if his heart's desire in the moment he wished was to know what his heart's desire was? It wouldn't do to lose the opportunity to a poorly defined wish. No, before he wished he felt an amount of self-reflection was necessary, though the surface of the depths was too swamped in darkness for that to be literal.

Why was he restless? What was it he wanted? Zooks stared intently into the depths, trying to ignore the whispers. Whatever discomfort this was had been greater than a day's bad temperament, he was sure of it; it was like suddenly noticing a long-standing unhappiness.

The light above him brightened and dimmed as clouds passed over; the wind rustled the leaves of the foliage all around. Suddenly, realisation came to him, and what he wanted seemed obvious in retrospect.

“I wish I knew more about where I came from,” he whispered, and dropped the coin. It hit the water and sank out of sight without a splash. He wasted no time in moving away from the edge, dropping down onto the grass and regarding the well with a glance back. He was less sure now how important that information was to him, and a little uneasy: having thrown the coin, Zooks felt as though he'd woken up from a dream, and in retrospect noticed a two-mindedness that had plagued him throughout the day.

At a carefully controlled pace, he kept one eye on the well and went back through the hedge, wading back through foliage on a track that seemed more overgrown than he'd remembered. He ducked under thorny branches and sidestepped nettles, still keeping a brisk, calm pace. When he reached the meadow, he looked back into the forest, but couldn't find the track on the forest floor. He waited until he was obscured by grass and safely in the meadow before running, as fast as he could, back uphill.

He was reluctant to tell anyone about the woods. At first, he wondered if the reluctance was entirely his own, but even feeling that his mind had been affected Zooks couldn't bring himself to overcome that reluctance. That night, he woke fitfully the first few times he tried to get to sleep, though he could never remember what he'd started dreaming about. He managed to stay asleep for the last half of the night, pulling the blanket over his head as light started to come through the windows, but noticed blearily that something felt different. The haze of sleep dissipated. He sat up warily and eyed the room, but the other children were asleep and all seemed calm.

He finally saw it when he looked down. On the outside of each arm stretched a pattern of smooth, cerulean scales.


	4. The Magic Spark

Ms. Rorforl was surprisingly gentle in her admonishments. She sat quietly as he recounted the story, and when his voice wavered at the parts where he'd been especially foolish, she put her arms around him and held him until he stopped shaking.

"I'm not going to tell you you should have come to one of us: it would be unfair to blame you for actions that weren't entirely your own. That said, it's very important that you feel you can come to us if you see anything else unusual as a result of this." She had a gravelly, firm voice that would sometimes frighten the youngest kids, but Zooks was old enough to recognize it as as a reassuring tone.

"Ms. Rorforl... what's going to happen to my arms?" he asked. He'd rushed to her office before any of the other kids could see them, and now that he'd had time to acclimatize, regarded the scales with muted horror.

She looked him in the eyes: reluctantly, he met her gaze. Her face was stern as ever, tusk like teeth jutting out from her lower jaw in a permanent snarl, but her voice was softer when she spoke. "Nothing more is likely to happen to them. This isn't a disease, or a curse: those scales are as much a part of you as your hair, or your hands. You wished to know where you came from, didn't you?"

"Yes," he said quietly.

"Your wish was granted. Somewhere in your family tree was draconic ancestry, and the effects of your heredity are just now presenting themselves. This isn't the first time I've seen something like this, and the people who went through these changes? They lived long, happy lives. Your ancestry is a part of you to be proud of, not ashamed: the fact that it's unusual doesn't make it any less a gift. In fact, if you learn to understand it and what it means, you might just find that there's a spark of magic in you to be harnessed."

Zooks felt the fear that had gripped him through the morning loosen, just a little. "I could do magic?" he asked. Curiosity and tentative hope began to take root.

"If you learn the right way of thinking about it, yes. I'll speak with Ethel: she might be willing to give you some guidance," she replied, and then her voice turned commanding. "Now get yourself downstairs, or you'll miss breakfast!" 

"Yes Ms. Rorforl, thank you Ms. Rorforl," he said, a spring in his step as he left.

She sighed once the door closed behind him and raised a hand, her palm flat in front of her. The space above it rippled and twisted into shadows, which folded upon themselves to take the shape of a raven, head tilted curiously.

"Sweep the island for evidence of enchantments: one of the ghosts influenced a child. When you find the culprit, bring it to me." Her eyes were hard and cold. 

The raven cawed, and dissolved into black mist only to re-coalesce as a mass of buzzing flies. Ms. Rorforl opened the window of her office just a crack as they swarmed outwards, splitting off in all directions.

* * *

The other children hadn't reacted as much to the scales as Zooks had expected: he'd rolled down his sleeves as he left the office, but pulled them up to show his friends in small groups. Their main curiosity had been why he was late to breakfast, and once answered seemed content with the explanation.

Azun, a kobold who'd joined the ranks of the few children Zooks' age even smaller than he was, was the most enthused by it. "You're part dragon?" she repeated after Zooks explained it. "So, can you breathe fire, or fly or anything?"

Zooks thought for a second for dramatic effect, then gave his friend a skeptical glance. "I only got these this morning: when would I have the chance to find out?" Nonetheless, it gave him a lot more questions to ask Ethel.

"You know, I'm pretty sure I'm part dragon too," she grinned. "We're basically actually related now."

"What kind of dragon are kobolds related to?"

Azun didn't know, but was undeterred. "Smallness elementals, probably. In which case, we're definitely related!" 

"I'm fairly sure there isn't an element of smallness," he frowned, but the last of his fears dissipated as he continued to chat with his friends.

* * *

 

He finally had the chance to approach Ethel after she finished their lesson on geography, which to most students remained an exotic phenomenon.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he started. Most of the other students had filed out of the classroom- some of his friends lingered curiously, but evidently decided to leave him his privacy and followed them out shortly after. "Has Ms. Rorforl had a chance to talk to you about my... condition?" He rolled up his sleeves for illustration.

Ethel turned from her lesson plan to face him, smiling beatifically. She was a short, heavyset woman - tall by his standards- with piercing green eyes and a crooked, upturned nose. Her hair was a wispy silver, tied up behind her in a tight bun, and she wore thick and formal black robes with gold jewelry clasped around her neck. "I had heard as much," she acknowledged, her voice a soft echoing rasp.

"If it isn't too much trouble, would you help me to understand it better when you have time?"

She laughed, shaking her head gently with an oscillating wheezing sound. "So polite! Of course, of course: I'll have time now before the afternoon lesson, in fact. Follow me." The classroom jutted out from the building like a large conservatory, painted in bands of light that peeked through gaps in the blinds. It had two exits: one a door to an inner hallway, through which the students had left; the other a small glass door to a set of fenced off gardens. She strode towards the latter with speed that belied her stature, and Zooks hurried to fall in step.

"Best to do this outside: that way if a spell backfires you're more likely to land in the mulch." Her face was plastered with a wide grin that revealed untidy yellow teeth: Zooks thought she was joking.

"I'd like to learn how to cast spells, ma'am, but is there anything you could tell me about people with draconic relatives before that? I'd like to know where I come from."

If anything, her grin widened. "Naturally!" she said, stepping around a patch of parsnips. "Let's see... from the colouration of your scales, the relative in question would have been a dragon aligned with electricity. They're not metallic, either, so it would most likely come from one of the bloodthirstier clans- perhaps from the mountainous region in the Farlands, as we covered a few lessons ago?"

Zooks was a little unsure how to process that fully, so focused on the first part. "What would it mean for me that it was aligned with electricity?" Ethel seemed to notice his jogging in an attempt to keep up with her, perhaps from the breathless way in which he said it, and slowed her pace as they passed through a wooden gate into an untilled patch of land.

"We should notice the difference when we test you for magical ability, but you will notice some effects that develop over time: namely, that electrical spells are cast more easily for you, and shocks end up a little less harmful. You should find that you're a lot more durable than you were, in fact."

"Will I be able to fly?" he asked, Azun's comment still on the mind.

Ethel laughed again. "I've certainly heard it happen, though it might be quicker for you to learn how to do it by magic than try to sprout wings. Both ways are a long way off, at any rate." She stopped in the centre of the garden, producing a small mechanical trinket from one of many pockets. "We're well placed for the first test," she declared, "But it's still wise to take precautions." She tapped him on the forehead, and a tingling sensation spread from the point of contact as his skin took on a supernatural toughness. "Now, take this. Imagine you've got a river of lightning running under your skin, and that you're pushing it out where your hand are in contact with the cube."

Zooks took the device in both hands, and frowned in concentration. The spell she'd cast made it feel like his skin itself was electrical, but he tried to imagine that each heartbeat was a surge of electricity underneath.

"When you're ready, say ' _fulminis_ '," she urged him.

He thought about the lightning, shaping it in his mind, and gripped the cube tightly. " _Fulminis_ ," he whispered. And, as if by magic, a spark flicked between his fingertips and into the device, which chugged and whirred as it began to emit a soft yellow light. He looked up at Ethel, eyes wide. "I did it," he said, in disbelief.

 


End file.
